Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be
ZX Spectrum games rewritten for the modern PC - by RetroSpec. We should all bow down and love these while we wait for Yak to finish Unity.
Lunar JetMan and even the very strange Halls of the Things! will now take valuable time away from my playing Far Cry…
July 31st, 2004
Oh yeah! Finally a movie that tells it like it really is: Team America: World Police. First the Thunderbirds are resurrected, and now this. Maybe civilization peaked in 1995 and we are slowly traveling backwards through time - first the eighties were really popular, now the 70s and puppet animation is back!
Add comment July 31st, 2004
John Kerry’s acceptance speech is catching quite a bit of criticism, but people forget how much flack Clinton got during his campaigns for being a long-winded boring speaker. Clinton did have charm and a touch of the “great communicator”, something that Kerry is not overflowing with. Practice will make better (we can only hope).
July 30th, 2004
Finally it works well enough to show to people.
My little labor of love is complete - ScriptUnit lets you write unit tests in JScript or VBScript. If you have a COM API that needs unit tests, then this is a very handy tool. I’m planning on using this at work. Microsoft can get testers who can write C++ and C#. The rest of us have to make do with testers who can write VBScript.
Add comment July 25th, 2004
Sondre Lerche - Two way monologue is very sweet laid-back guitar music. Perfect for relaxing/chilling to while the sun is baking your head.
Kings of Convenience - Riot on an empty street is quiet singing over guitars and piano that you can sit and watch (beer in hand) people walking past your window to.
Add comment July 20th, 2004
by Iain Pears. 700 pages. (amazon)
A fingerpost is a post with a finger on it that points to the solution. This is a nicely layered crime drama set in Oxford in 1660s. The Royal Society is being set up, dogs are being exploded and vivisected by professors, Cromwell has just departed, Roman Catholics roam the english countryside furtively. In the middle of this, an italian fop/doctor arrives, a professor is poisoned, and a local witch is hanged and burned. Gripping stuff.
But the story peels back in layers - four stories from four different perspectives, each building on the next, leading to a fingerpost. First the italian doctor describes what he saw happen, then a student bent on avenging his father describes the same events as part of his own, larger narrative. A professor and cryptographer tells his story, before finally a historian and scholar ties the whole thing up in a nice bundle. Each narrator is selfish and self centered as only gentlemen of the 1600s can be. Foreigners and women had better know their places, and honor and breeding excuse anything untowards.
I read this just after Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver and Confusion which are set in roughly the same time period, but which do a better job of communicating the flavor of the period I think. The “Fingerpost” mentions the cold and the damp, but you don’t feel it as strongly. Stephenson describes the environment more vividly, while Pears brings his characters to life through words and action in a much more realistic way (Stephenson is writing opera, so his superheroes of the 17th century are excusable). The student’s narrative makes for uneasy reading, as you sense the malice in the words and descriptions, while it never explicitly says so.
Having the narrators embedded in the story this way makes for a very enjoyable read. You miss the omniscient authorial voice every now and then (more background info would have been nice in some interstitial chapters) but the experience of peeling back the layers of perceptions to get to the “truth” is recommended.
Add comment July 20th, 2004
Woody Guthrie spins in his grave - a very funny parody of “This Land” by Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry.
Add comment July 17th, 2004
Students and teachers fired from the Rio Rancho public school for reading poetry in New Mexico. Yes, the war on terror is going well…
Add comment July 6th, 2004
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Jun | Aug » | |||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
